He had gone out that evening feeling miserable, though instinctively knowing that in the end she must come back to him. Yes, in the end, but how long, he asked himself, would the end be in coming? Jessica seemed to have hypnotized her, to be able now to make her do her bidding in any way she chose. Several times he had seen her and her two undesirable friends and Yootha all seated together round a table on the terrace of the hotel, smoking cigarettes and drinking what looked like whisky and soda in full view of everybody passing.
Again and again he had blamed himself for having allowed her to adopt Mrs. Mervyn-Robertson as her chaperone. Chaperone! Why, he said mentally, a hundred times safer she would have been with no chaperone than with that dissolute woman to look after her, and her dévergondé companions.
Two nights later, on returning to the hotel, he was handed a note by the clerk in the office. Recognizing Yootha’s handwriting on the envelope, he took the note up to his bedroom to read it in private. It was short, and ran as follows:
“Dear Charlie,—This is just to tell you that I am leaving here to-morrow with Jessica and her friends. We are going to Monte first, then probably we shall stay in Paris a little while, and after that we shall return to London, when I shall hope to see you. I don’t want to quarrel with you, dear. Indeed I don’t, and I am dreadfully sorry you should misjudge Jessica in the way you do. She is such a good friend to me now, and I hope we shall continue to be friends. But most of all I wish you would overcome your prejudices against her, so that we might all be friends together. I hate making you unhappy, as I feel I am doing, but truly I think you are unintentionally to blame. Lots of love, my dear.
“Yootha.”
“Curse the woman!” he exclaimed aloud, “and the abominable way she has taught Yootha to gamble. Well, I suppose I can do nothing at the moment. I only hope to heaven that at Monte the whole lot will lose heavily, so heavily that Yootha at any rate will be brought to her senses once and for all. Meanwhile I must try to hurry on our wedding.”
Yootha went off early next day without seeing him or even leaving a note to wish him good-by. A week later he heard indirectly that at the tables in Monte Carlo the four were still winning. A report reached the Royal Hotel in Dieppe that they had won a fabulous sum. It was quite extraordinary, everybody said. Never within the memory of the oldest habitués of the Dieppe Casino had players had such a run of luck. And its consistency was that they all played “anyhow,” or seemed to. On the few occasions when they had experimented with some system, they had lost heavily—so it was said.
“Yootha, my darling,” Jessica remarked casually to her one night towards the end of a champagne supper at which all sorts of people were present, for their luck had brought them a whole host of “friends,” “what has become of your knight-errant—or is he your knight-errant no longer? I should be delighted if I heard you had thrown him over, or even that he had thrown you over. Have you heard from him lately?”
“Not very lately,” Yootha replied quickly, with a slight frown which Jessica did not fail to notice. “He has gone back to London, I believe.”
“‘You believe.’ That doesn’t sound promising, does it?” and she laughed in her deep voice, though it was not a pleasant laugh. “When a man is engaged to be married, especially to such a charming girl—a girl any man ought to be proud to speak to, let alone be engaged to—it isn’t very considerate of him to leave her in the lurch in the way Captain Preston left you. And if he neglects you now, don’t you think he’s pretty sure to begin neglecting you when you have been married a little while?”